Scouting for blogs
Jinfo Blog

19th February 2009

By Diana Nutting

Item

Scout Labs, http://www.scoutlabs.com/ which appears to be an independent start up US based company, has launched what it describes as a market research service, but what I would regard rather as an input into market intelligence as it does not attempt to use statistically significant samples of data and analyse them. Scout Labs claims to enable clients to hear what their customers love and hate about their brands and reach influential customers to build relationships. It does this by searching the Web, especially blog posts and Twitter items, for mentions of the user’s company or brand name and relevant keywords (it is only available in English language) to see what people are saying about the product or company. Results are available within a couple of hours of a post appearing, and alerts can be sent daily, weekly or monthly. Scout is priced by the number of key words you can search for in an account, starting at $99 a month for five search terms. Scout Labs is fully automated, and does not just collate online opinion about the product, but gauges its sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral. It will also show share of voice in the blogosphere, compared with competitors. Users can see each blog post, video or image that has to do with the brand, and the interface shows how mentions increase and decrease over time. Scout Labs then analyses each blog post or Twitter item and decides if it is broadly speaking, negative, positive or neutral to the brand. It also ranks the source of the content to highlight more influential sources. The idea is then that you can manage the perception of your brand by creating a discussion thread around a blog post, Twitter item, or YouTube video. This could be a useful service for monitoring not only one’s own brand in the market place but also for competitor intelligence, although it is not positioned as a competitive intelligence tool.

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